1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to data processing, and more particularly to object abstraction and logging.
2. Background Information
There is a desire to connect an enormous variety of objects to a network for monitoring and control. This includes objects which have never been, or rarely have been connected to networks before, e.g., animals, plants, and stationary or mobile assets such as equipment and vehicles.
To date, approaches for combining disparate objects into an information system have been limited. In one approach, a system interface is defined and, as long as the objects being measured meet the predefined criteria, the system can present their measurements. For example, a heart-rate, soil moisture level, or vehicular speed may all be presented as varying voltage levels and presented using a fixed representation. Such systems have limited flexibility and little or no capability for transforming or combining data from multiple sources in order to create new data. For example, a device may not have general-purpose extensibility to combine “voltage” and “current” samples in order to compute a new “power” sample, log it, and transmit it across a network. Often, such processing has to be relegated to another system.
A second approach is to a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. SCADA systems typically are usually built around a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). As such, they also may be limited in their flexibility.
A third approach is to build a purpose-built data acquisition and data presentation system. Such systems can be expensive to build and maintain, and it is difficult to adapt a purpose-built system to new problems.
An extensible system and methodology is needed in order to provide for the connectivity, control, data transformation, logging, and presentation for this diverse set of objects. Further complicating the problem is that connectivity is needed from objects to embedded computing devices—with limited processing and storage capabilities. The system and methodology must be applicable equally to modest embedded computing devices as well as more capable general computing platforms.
What is needed is a system and method for object abstraction that addresses these issues and other issues that will become apparent while reading the following specification.